My Story: Part II

I don’t remember exactly when or where it stopped. I remember some inappropriate contact during the school year, but nothing close to Christmas, so I’m thinking it stopped in September or October of that year.

By then I was convinced I’d committed a mortal sin, and since I’d been baptized and reared in the Roman Catholic church, I was pretty sure that not only would my family not love me anymore – I was also certain I was going to hell.

I just knew I couldn’t tell anybody. If it had to be between me and God, then so be it. He was a much less immediate threat than being ostracized and despised by my parents and grandparents.

I also can’t pin down when the other heavy feelings set in, but I know I eventually came to feel Wrong. Bad. Disgusting. Repulsive. Marked. Tainted. Dirty. This was in the mid-80s when AIDS was a huge, new health crisis and I remember sitting in the bathtub looking at my body and wondering if maybe I had AIDS, too. I knew it was spread through sexual contact, and we were beginning to have health classes at school that included the human reproductive systems, so I figured I might be a candidate for this global killer virus. I didn’t know any better and felt I couldn’t ask.

That’s a huge burden for a 5th grader to have on her shoulders as she lay down to sleep at night.

Adolescence is hard for everybody, but I remember it being excruciating for me because of the conflict within my body and my heart and my mind. My body was disgusting and wrong, I was bad and dirty and tainted, yet I was becoming a woman and becoming interested in boys. I was fascinated by all things involved in dating and also petrified to have anyone touch me. I honestly couldn’t stand for anyone to touch me, even as another part of me was screaming out for physical affection.

I am tempted to say my life felt empty, but it was also paradoxically full – I felt numbed inside apart from the constant fear that someone would discover what had happened to me (translate: what I’d done), that I’d be found out and punished and the love I had from my parents would disappear.

I just remember pain, fear, confusion, frustration at times. And I remember looking at my body and feeling things I couldn’t even verbalize because I hadn’t the emotional or mental maturity to do so yet.

That’s quite a mindfuck – to feel things you can’t even put words to because your human self isn’t yet as mature as your soul is.

I never dated in high school and only went to one dance. I focused on my grades and school activities. I focused on finding external validation of my existence and currying approval from my parents and grandparents, so that I could be assured they loved me.

I wasn’t capable of loving myself.

I was convinced I didn’t truly deserve it, from me or from anyone else.

I remember always being so full of conflict, so lonely, and always, always so afraid.